Wednesday 21 December 2016

Lions and Tigers and Interdictors, oh my!


Interdictor pilots are a little different from the rest of us. They fly ships made of wet tissue paper, and yet hold down the largest ships you can find in New Eden, tackling entire fleets all at once.

Here's what EveUni says about them:

Interdictor pilots will have poor Kill/Death ratios. You will be called primary in every engagement with the enemy. You will be the number one threat to any enemy fleet.

Pretty much. Which is why it takes a certain kind of someone to fly an Interdictor. They belong to the 'tackle something and see what happens' school of flying.

This weekend we had a perfect example. Someone had tackled a Gnosis just off a gate in null sec. They were struggling with breaking the tank, and they were pretty sure there was some kind of response fleet coming, so the call went out for some dps.

Already in my Manticore, I went to help. A few of us arrived at around the same time, and we all opened fire. As we ground him down, the Gnosis lit a cyno.

The world went crazy, and several things happened at once. In no particular order, the Gnosis exploded, FOUR carriers landed on us, and our Interdictor threw up a bubble.

Sitting at 50km, and able to immediately cloak up, I was reasonably safe. However, for the Gila stuck in the bubble with four carriers, things looked very, very grim.

After some fancy flying, and a great deal of heat damage to his prop mod, our Gila managed to extract himself from the bubble and warp out. As we flew back to Chaos, we were all having a laugh while the Gila pilot berated the Interdictor pilot on coms. Why had he thrown up a bubble? We couldn't take on four carriers with our little gang!

"Yes", our Interdictor calmly replied, "But if there had only been one carrier we would have killed it, and I would have been a hero."

And THAT is the attitude that makes you an Interdictor pilot. He saw a cyno and had no idea what was coming, but he was absolutely certain that he wanted to tackle it.

Perfect.


No comments:

Post a Comment